Axel, a cautious young man engaged to the lovely Gräuben, begged his uncle to reconsider. “The heat will crush us! The pressure will boil our blood!” But Lidenbrock’s eyes blazed like forge fires. Within a week, they had traveled to Iceland, hired a stoic eider-duck hunter named Hans Bjelke as their guide, and stood at the lip of Snæfellsjökull’s extinct crater as the sun aligned with three mountain peaks—just as Saknussemm had written.

They fled into a labyrinth of tunnels, only to be caught in a sudden volcanic surge. Their raft, hurled into a shaft of rising magma, shot upward like a bullet through a rifle barrel. Rocks spun past; the heat became unbearable. Axel lost consciousness.

In the autumn of 1863, Professor Otto Lidenbrock—a man whose volcanic temper matched his towering intellect—discovered a crumbling Icelandic manuscript tucked inside an ancient book from Snorri Sturluson’s Edda. Hidden within the runes was a coded message. After three sleepless days, his nephew Axel cracked the cipher: “Descend into the crater of Snæfellsjökull, before the Kalends of July, bold traveler, and you shall reach the center of the Earth. I have done this. —Arne Saknussemm”

When he awoke, he was lying on a hillside covered in ash, staring at the Mediterranean Sea. They had been ejected from Stromboli, in Italy—having traveled nearly 3,000 miles through the Earth’s crust. Lidenbrock, bruised but triumphant, declared, “Science has won! The center of the Earth is not a molten ball, but a cathedral of lost worlds!”

Back in Hamburg, they became heroes. Axel married Gräuben. Hans returned to Iceland, richer but silent. And the professor? He spent his remaining years trying to decipher another rune—one that whispered of a passage to the Moon. Axel burned that page. Some journeys, he wrote in his memoirs, are meant to end with a kiss, not a crater.

On a vast underground shore, they discovered a prehistoric forest: giant mushrooms towering like oaks, ferns the size of ships. And there, preserved in the stone, were fossils of creatures unknown to science. Then came the impossible: a herd of mastodons, grazing under a sky lit by electrically charged gas clouds. And behind them, a twelve-foot human—a giant, wielding a stone axe.

The descent began with ropes and lanterns, winding through lava tubes festooned with glittering crystals. By the second day, their compass spun wildly. By the fifth, they had lost all sense of depth. Then came the water shortage. Axel, delirious, nearly turned back, but Hans found a subterranean river—the “Hansbach”—which they followed for weeks, deeper and deeper.